I am so excited! This story has a legitimate cover now! Thank you so much to andychipss on Instagram for the amazing cover art! (Look closely: She even did a very accurate recreation of Kit Fisto's lightsaber hilt in Marco's hand!)
This chapter is called "Raid the Hanger". You know, like the episode titled "Raid the Cave"? Get it?
Yeah, you get it.
"It's right through here," Janna said, stepping around a blind in the rock.
Sure enough, there it was, the ground abruptly dropping off into a sharp slope. It was easy to see how Marco had fallen down it in the dark. Even in daylight, it was almost invisible until the girls were right on top of it, thanks to the rock face that jutted out just a few meters behind it, leaving the top of the slope exposed to sunlight.
"So that's the cave, huh?" Star looked down the slope. As opposed to most of the ground they had encountered which was either big slabs or hardened lava flows, this slope was made of loose rocks, none larger than half of a meter across. The gaps between were filled with smaller stones and sand.
"Yup. That's where I found Marco." Janna pointed. "Look, there's some drips of blood on the rocks from when I hauled him up the slope."
"Oh, that's greaaaat." Star elected not to look at the blood and instead began slowly and carefully making her way down.
Janna followed, choosing a path down a few meters away. "Keep an eye out for whatever Marco cut his leg on. There has to be something in here."
They slowly worked their way down the slope, searching for anything sharp enough to slice through skin. Halfway down, Star spotted something sticking up from between the rocks. It had a layer of dark, crusty dried blood on it.
"Janna! I think I found it!"
"Hang on, I'm coming!"
Janna scurried over the loose stones to where Star stood. There, sticking up only about 8 or 9 centimeters out of the rocks was a thin piece of rusty metal. Curiously, both edges had perfect and identical 90 degree bends.
"This looks like a bracket of some kind," Janna said, pointing to the bends. She grabbed it with her right hand and attempted to yank it out of the ground, but it was stuck fast and did not budge. "Do you think you could dig this thing out with the Force?"
"Not a problem!" Star said, confidently flexing her fingers. "Stand back!"
"Just don't pull out a load bearing rock and cause a rock slide," Janna called as she hurried out of the way.
"No promises." Star raised her arms and began to carefully maneuver the rocks away from the piece of metal, floating them out of the way with the Force. From her safe distance, Janna watched as more and more of it was exposed. "What the heck...?"
Star let the pair of rocks she was lifting drop and they tumbled to the bottom of the slope. "'What the heck' is right. It looks like-"
"Stairs?" Janna said as she came over for a closer look. The piece of metal that had been sticking out of the ground was a bracket that secured a stair tread to the metal scaffold frame, bent out so that it stuck straight up into the air. The stairs were on their side, the treads vertically on end and partially smashed.
"Why is there a set of stairs buried in the side of this slope in a cave?" Star asked, not really expecting an answer.
"I don't know..." Janna looked up the side of the rock face that was nearly directly above their heads, studying it carefully. "But I think I could take a guess." She pointed up the cliff side. "Look, there's anchors in the rock. And, you know, holes where anchors used to be. Check out the pattern they're in."
"I see it! Those stairs used to be attached to the side of the cliff there."
"Exactly. And look at the very top. The top of the cliff looks like it's been sheered off."
"So the top of the rock face came off and ripped the stairs down, and then the stairs were buried by the falling rock."
"Exactly. So the question is..." Janna paused purely for dramatic effect. "Why were there stairs here?"
Without waiting for Star to respond, Janna carefully climbed the rest of the way down the slope, pulling Marco's lightsaber from her belt as she reached the bottom. She knelt down and ignited the blade, the edge of the glow revealing the dried pool of blood several meters away. She examined the floor as Star came down beside her. "Check it out. Remember I said the floor of the cave was smooth? Far too smooth to have formed naturally," Janna said. "I barely noticed when I was down here before because, you know, Marco was laying in a puddle of his own blood over there." She motioned with the blade of the lightsaber, at which point Star noticed the bodies of the worms Janna had slain in defending Marco. Captain Ordonia got back to her feet. "This cave may have formed naturally, but it was definitely modified for use of some kind." She smiled excitedly. "Let's find out what they were doing down here."
"I'm right behind you!" Star ignited her own lightsaber to increase the illumination. "Lead the way, Janna Banana!"
They squeezed past the lifeless body of the giant cave monster and made their way deeper into the cave. Their footsteps, though light, echoed back at them from the walls and ceiling.
"So, Janna, Marco said you were pretty good with that lightsaber when you rescued him," Star said.
"Did he?" Janna kicked at a pebble on the ground and sent it skipping across the smooth floor. "It felt really cool using it. I promised Marco I wouldn't lose this thing. I never said I was going to give it back," she replied slyly.
Star laughed, genuinely unable to tell if Janna was kidding or not. Her laugh was abruptly cut short when she tripped on something and nearly fell flat on her face.
"Whoa! You okay there, Star?" Janna asked.
"I'm fine. What the heck was that?" She held her lightsaber low to better illuminate the ground. There on the smooth floor was a hunk of durasteel, curved and about twice the size of her hand. She picked it up. "What is this?"
Star handed it to Janna to examine. "It looks like a piece of armor," Janna said, "like a shoulder guard."
"I wonder what that's doing here."
Janna held up her lightsaber and looked deeper into the cave. Something was there on the ground at the edge of her light. Moving closer, she could see that it was a pile of bones, some still connected to each other, like the legs and lower torso, one arm laying separated on the ground. Some lay scattered on the floor, several of them broken. The remains of the skeleton were partially encased in armor made of the same material, and it was peeled open like a fruit. Most disturbingly of all, however, there was no skull.
Janna crouched down to examine the remains. "I'm gonna say it came from this guy."
Star examined the skeleton for herself. "Yikes. I wonder what could have made the armor peel open like that. Think he was torn apart by a monster like the one you killed?"
Janna held the lightsaber even closer, carefully running her hand over the armor. "There are marks on the metal here that look like charring," she observed. "He was blown up by an explosive." She hopped back to her feet. "This just keep getting more interesting! C'mon, let's see what else is down here!"
Star followed close behind as Janna hurried deeper into the cave. They didn't have to go far, however. Another fifteen steps or so and the cave abruptly opened up.
"Whoa," Janna gasped as her eyes drank in the sight.
The space was nearly 100 meters across and relatively circular. The walls stretched far, far up above their heads, gradually growing closer together to give the room a conical shape. A massive, jammed half-open retractable hatch capped the top, allowing just enough light by which to see into the room.
There were supply crates and munitions stacked in various places along the walls, and large pieces of dusty, long-silent equipment patiently awaiting use.
But most impressively, there were spaceships.
At least two dozen ships filled the room which was clearly a hanger. Two large shuttles stood on the far side of the room. Three identical freighters were parked side by side by side just in front of where the girls stood. And in the center were the fighters; long, pointed, aggressive looking single pilot ships with wide s-foils and armed with big laser canons.
"Star?"
"Yeah?"
"We hit the jackpot, Baby."
"Aw, yeahhh."
Janna began to step into the room, but Star suddenly held out her arm and stopped her. "Wait. Something is weird here."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know. But something has got my weirdness senses tingling." Star slowly scanned the hanger, seeking out anything that might clue her in on her own inexplicable uncomfortable feeling. Her eyes landed on something in the middle of the floor between them and the nearest cargo ship. In the edges of the glow from her lightsaber, she could see that it was a massive worm, just like the ones Janna had slain that she had seen at the cave entrance. And it was dead. "Look! It's one of those worms!"
"Oh yeah. Huh. I wonder what killed it." Janna was unphased.
"There's another one over there!" Star pointed to it with her lightsaber blade. This one was off to the right, closer to the wall. "And another! Way down there."
"Huh." Now Janna was becoming puzzled. "I wonder why they're dead. I mean, they were parasites, maybe they just couldn't survive without a host."
"I don't know...something still feels off..." Star scratched her head with the bottom of her lightsaber hilt.
"Well, I don't think there's anything to worry about," Janna said confidently. "Let's have a little look around first, and then cut some panels off one of these cargo ships here to fix the Raventalon." Star reluctantly followed as Captain Ordonia headed into the room, but they had only taken a half dozen steps before a loud whirring sound echoed through the space and froze them in their tracks. Both girls looked to the left toward the sound and saw two glowing yellow eyes staring at them from the far side of the room. The eyes were attached to a hulking droid that was in the process of standing up from its folded-down compact configuration.
"UNIDENTIFIED PERSONNEL DETECTED. STATE YOUR AUTHORIZATION CODE." The droid stood nearly twice as tall as each of the girls, imposing even from twenty meters away.
Star and Janna stood stunned, unsure what to do. "Uhhhhhhh..." They chorused.
"UNRECOGNIZED AUTHORIZATION CODE: 'UHHHHH.' SECURITY BREACH, MAIN HANGER, SECTOR TWO."
The droid's arms, previously straight down at its sides, snapped upwards straight out. It possessed no hands or grasping implements of any kind. Instead, on the end of each its arms were the barrels of five heavy blasters, arranged into a circle. They spat blaster bolts rapid-fire at Janna and Star.
"AAAAHH!" The girls cried as they sprinted toward the nearest cargo ship. On the floor beside it was a stack of supply crates, and they dove behind it, narrowly avoiding obliteration.
"Well, I guess now we know what killed the worms," Janna said. "A very aggressive security droid."
"Funny how it didn't attack that giant monster," Star observed.
Janna shrugged. "That monster was probably so big that it didn't register as a living thing. That droid has to be over a thousand years old, it probably can't tell the difference."
"SECURITY BREACH, MAIN HANGER, SECTOR TWO." The mechanical whining of servos accompanied the metallic clanks of the droid's metal feet on the smooth stone floor as it advanced on the girls. Fortunately, its joints were stiff as its ancient lubricant became thick and sticky, and it could not move very quickly.
Janna switched off Marco's lightsaber, returning it to her belt. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out her DC-17 blaster pistol. "Thing makes a pretty big and slow target. Shouldn't be hard to hit."
Poking her head up just high enough to see over the crates, Janna squeezed off six shots from her blaster. Five found their mark and struck the droid's torso. The droid did not appear to have even noticed. It returned fire, orange bolts of energy slamming into the other side of the supply crates as Janna ducked down again. "Man! That thing has some tough armor!"
"So what's plan B?" Star asked.
Both girls flinched as another round of blaster fire struck their cover.
"I'm open to suggestions," Janna said nonchalantly.
Star carefully peaked over the top of the crates and watched the old droid clomping slowly toward them. She spied a large piece of starship servicing equipment that the droid was just about to walk past over to the left.
"I have an idea. I'll use the Force to throw that big piece of equipment at it and knock it over. As soon as it's down, you run out and hack it up with your lightsaber."
Janna smirked. "I like this plan. Let's do it."
Star smiled, feeling confident, and switched off her own lightsaber. She held her hand up, fingers outstretched, concentrating hard. Janna watched, poised to take off running, as the large piece of servicing equipment rose off the floor. A second later, it launched at the droid and slammed into its back with a mighty crash. To both Star and Janna's surprise, the hulking droid barely budged. It did, however, swivel around with lightning speed, the upper half of its body rotating independently of its legs, and it fired a salvo of rounds into it, pummeling the machine with blaster bolts. Then it whirled around once more and Star ducked back down as its photoreceptors made eye contact with her.
"So much for that idea. Now what do we-? Janna?"
Janna was gone.
"Janna? Where'd you go?"
Star looked around, careful to keep her head down as the droid slowly bared down on her.
And then, Star saw her.
When the droid had turned its back to attack the service equipment, Janna had taken off running as planned, but instead of running straight at the droid, she circled around in front of the cargo ship on the left. The ship itself was clearly designed in the style of centuries past. No streamlining whatsoever, it had plenty of easily accessed flat surfaces to utilize for climbing. She scaled the front end of the ship and clambered atop it, and that's where Star spotted her.
The smuggler made eye contact with Star, holding up the deactivated lightsaber hilt in her hand and silently motioning through her plan. Star understood.
"Hey! Ugly!" Star yelled as she jumped up from behind the supply crates. The droid took more careful aim at her. "Nah nah! Can't hit me!" Star's lightsaber blade flashed to life in her hand as she taunted the security droid. It fired on her again, Star twirling her lightsaber with such blinding speed that her emerald blade became nothing but a blur as she deflected the oncoming bolts away.
The droid slowly continued to advance until it was directly below Janna. She leapt off the top of the cargo ship, igniting Marco's lightsaber on her way down.
"YAAAAAA!"
The droid stopped shooting and looked up to see what was happening. The result was the lightsaber blade being plunged into its head right between its glowing orange photoreceptors.
The impact with the droid caused Janna to lose her grip on the lightsaber hilt as the blade lodged itself in the droid's innards. She tumbled down onto the floor, landing on her rear just in front of the security droid as the photoreceptors slowly faded out. The droid was off-balance, however, and it began to topple over forward, right toward Janna.
"Uh-!"
"Janna!" Star raised her left hand and pulled Captain Ordonia backwards with the Force, just far enough that the droid crashed to the ground directly in front of her.
"Woosh," Janna breathed in relief. "That was close. Thanks for the save, Star." She grabbed the hilt of Marco's lightsaber sticking out of the front of the droid's head directly in front of her and yanked it up, slicing a long gash into the droid's back as she extracted it.
Star vaulted over the supply crates and strolled over to Janna, offering her hand. "No big!" the young Jedi said happily. Janna took the offered hand and Star helped the smuggler to her feet. "Good thinking, by the way! You really took that droid completely by surprise!"
Janna brushed some dust from the floor off of her skirt. "Thanks. Not gonna lie, that felt awesome."
"You totally were! But I really hope there aren't more of those things."
"Yeah, me too," Janna said as she strolled over to the side of the cargo ship she had just jumped off of. "Well, we definitely found what we were looking for. Just one of these cargo ships oughta give us all the material we need to repair the Raventalon."
"Aw, yeah! We'll be out of here in no time!"
"Before we start cutting it up, though, what do you say we take a little look around? I really want to see what else is here."
"Uh..." Star was apprehensive. She really wanted to get back to Marco. But, she supposed, there was no telling what they might find here. There could be something useful for all they knew. "Okay. But just for a little bit."
"Awesome!" Janna said excitedly. "Let's go!"
They strolled around between the ships, Janna, being a pilot, finding the centuries-old fighters very interesting.
And dusty.
"Kinda weird they'd go through the effort of hollowing out a mountain," Star said. "I would think it would be easier to just...you know...build a hanger."
"I bet this mountain already was hollow," Janna said, looking up at the ceiling. "It was probably a volcano. All this rock is volcanic. Plus, there's no way that eighty percent of the landscape would all be mountains from tectonic activity. I bet this planet was nothing but volcanoes a couple million years ago. That cave we came in through was probably a naturally formed magma vent. They just ground the floor smooth and-"
Star covered her ears and shuddered as she walked. "Oh, Janna, please stop talking!"
Janna laughed at Star's boredom and hopped up on the S-foil of a fighter to peer into the cockpit canopy. "It's kinda weird," Janna said. "Aside from the collapsed stairs where we came in, which could have very easily happened naturally, this base looks like it was just abandoned. In a hurry, too."
Star hopped up atop another stack of supply crates and scanned the hanger. "Yeah, you're right. It's almost as if everyone just..." She shrugged. "Up and left."
"Yeah. Weird." Janna spotted something on the far side of the hanger opposite where they had come in. She pointed to it. "Look, there's another tunnel. Let's see where that one goes."
They headed down into the mountain once more, requiring their lightsabers to see again. This tunnel was different than the one they had entered through. Electrical conduits lined the walls, centuries-dark lights hung from the ceiling at evenly spaced intervals, and the ground had been covered by a glass-smooth black tile.
"Huh, why is this tunnel different?" Star wondered aloud.
"That other cave is probably just an access tunnel." Janna pointed to a door set into the wall on the right just ahead. "This is probably, like, administration and control rooms or something."
The doors had seized shut long ago, but Star managed to coax them open with the Force. The first room turned out to be a scanner monitoring room. To their surprise, some of the equipment was still turned on and functioning.
"Bet you a thousand credits this is what was causing the comm interference," said Janna as she rapped her knuckles on the top of the computer.
The next room was a shield generator, and the one after that was a room with a large table and several holoprojectors that Janna hypothesized to be a war meeting room.
Forty-five minutes later and Star was both getting bored and beginning to feel the darkness surrounding the planet press in upon her again. "Can we head back to the ship now?"
"Just one more thing. I want to know what the stairs that collapsed lead up to."
"Alright. I actually do kinda want to know what's up there myself."
They made the long trek back to the opposite end of the hidden air base. On the walk back through the entrance cave, Star noticed that there were lights installed in the ceiling, nearly invisible if you weren't looking right at them.
"Darn, if only I'd seen them the first time, it would have been super obvious that there was something else here and not just a cave," Janna mused. "Oh, well."
As they clambered up the slope out of the cave, Star posed a question. "So, uh, how exactly do we get up that rock face without the stairs?"
"Can you jump it? Like, you know, how you can boost yourself with the Force?"
Star shook her head. "Nah, even with the Force, that's too high for me to jump. Oh! But I could just lift you up there from down here!"
"Works for me."
At the top of the slope, Star and Janna took their positions. "Ready?" asked Star.
"Go for it."
Star lifted her hands and concentrated on Janna. The smuggler slowly levitated off the ground. "Whoa, this feels weird."
"Do you want me to put you down?"
"I didn't say it was bad-weird. Keep going!"
Star slowly raised her hands above her head as she guided Janna up the side of the rock face, gently setting her down at the top. "See anything up there?" Star called.
"Yeah, there's like a path carved into the rock! I'm gonna follow it and see where it leads!"
"Okay!" Star called up. "Just be careful! And don't be gone too long!"
"Okay!"
Just as Janna had said, beneath her feet was a pathway, etched into the surface of the rock. Urged on by curiosity, she followed it. The ground was uneven. It was, after all, a mountain. Janna followed it as it rose and fell and twisted over the uneven terrain.
After about five minutes, the path wrapped around the back of a large outcropping of rock. When Janna turned the corner, she could see that the path actually turned one-hundred and eighty degrees into the front of the outcrop. The rock had been hollowed out, a door set into the eons-hardened lava, and beside it, a surprisingly still intact transparisteel window.
"What in the galaxy...?"
Janna tried the door, and to her immense surprise, it opened. She stepped through, immediately perplexed at what she saw. There was a single chair, patiently waiting in front of a control panel with a large screen set into it.
"What could this possibly control?"
Janna fiddled with a knob on the dusty control panel, not expecting anything to happen, but the screen suddenly lit up. "Whoa!" Janna leaned closer and inspected the screen. It appeared to be some kind of targeting system. "Targeting for what, though?" Taking a seat in the metal chair behind her, Janna's eyes scanned the controls. They were labeled, the plaques written in aurebesh unlike the text on the wall in the execution chamber they had taken shelter in some days earlier, so while this place was centuries old, it was not quite the same level of ancient.
Beside the control panel was a lever in the floor labeled "deploy." Driven by curiosity, Janna grasped it and pulled it down.
With a cacophony of loud mechanical noises, Janna watched as a previously buried hatch two hundred yards out from the mountain parted in the center, and out of the ground came a long, narrow contraption that pointed straight up into the sky. It was easily one hundred meters long, supported by a pair of fixed legs twenty meters up from the lower end. Affixed to the bottom end was a much thicker component, it's purpose unknown.
"Whoa."
The commlink in Janna's pocket chimed and she answered it. "Hello?"
"Janna! What the heck is that thing?! Did you do that?" Star cried on the other end of the transmission.
"Uh...I did."
"What the heck is it?!"
"Not sure yet." Janna cut the transmission.
Now hungry for answers, Janna trained her eyes on the screen. It was definitely a targeting computer, so that thing that had just come out of the ground was definitely a weapon of some kind. But something was off.
"Those preset coordinates...that's clear to the opposite side of the galaxy. There's no way a laser could shoot that far!"
Janna looked out the window and squinted at the massively long contraption outside. It definitely was not a canon of any kind. It didn't appear to have a barrel, for one thing. It looked like just a long, square-forged beam of durasteel. The only other feature was what looked to be a slot all the way down the center.
Janna's eyes went wide. "It's a rail gun!"
"A rail gun?"
Janna nearly hit the ceiling when she jumped in surprise. Star was standing right next to her. She hadn't even heard the young Jedi come in. "For crying out loud, Star! You nearly gave me a heart attack!" She took a deep breath. "I actually probably deserved that."
Star gave no discernible reaction to Janna's comment. "Why would the ancient Sith have a rail gun?"
"Beats the heck outta me. But if it launched a powered projectile, the range of this thing is probably pretty close to infinite." Janna glanced at the targeting computer again. "I wonder how accurate it is..."
A massive, ancient rail gun certainly is not something one happens upon every day. Janna was practically itching to try it out. But she caught sight of Star's face. The Padawan was beginning to look jittery and downright uncomfortable again, just as she had when they had first landed on Moraband.
Janna sighed. "As much as I would love to test it out, we probably should focus on getting out of here. I can always come back another time." She smiled at Star, who looked relieved. "Come on." She took Marco's lightsaber from her belt and held it up. "Who wants to go cut up a centuries-old cargo ship?"
That was all Star needed to hear. "Ooh! Ooh! I do!"
Janna laughed. "Let's go then!"
And as they left the control room, Janna pushed the lever she had pulled earlier back up again, and the rail gun retracted back into the ground.
"How did you even get up here?" Janna asked as they returned the way they had come.
Star gave Janna a playful shove. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
"Uh, yeah, that's why I just asked."
Star just skipped ahead. Janna shook her head and smiled.
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